Extract From Byte Magazine - May 14

[Steve Bildermann]

As BYTE is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.

This column will be filed from WinHEC, the annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. I try very hard to get to WinHEC; it is always one of the best conferences I attend. The conference content is more than worth the trip, and the attendees all know a lot that I need to find out. This year it's in New Orleans. New Orleans is hot and muggy in early May, but there's good food and it's a pleasant place to walk when the wind's blowing and you have good company.

The trip here was uneventful, barring the usual idiocy of the "security" arrangements which would be more accurately described as the "airport avoidance conditioning system." If Al Qaeda had set out to lobby the U.S. Congress to destroy the air travel industry by imposing onerous and silly regulations in the guise of increasing safety, it would have cost far more in bribes to achieve far less effective results. We have done this to ourselves, and we aren't much safer for having done it.

In our case, Alex had to leave the secure area to mail his nail clippers with their 1.5inch blade home to himself; when he came back in, they decided to go through a more personal search, presumably to justify their salaries since he had already been inside and could have remained there by forfeiting the nail clippers.

Otherwise the trip wasn't bad. Of course most of the amenities and all the grace of air travel are long gone. American Airlines has given us endurable leg room, but if the chap in the seat in front of you leans his seat back, it's pretty well impossible to use a laptop: You're too close to the keyboard. The good news is that you can use a Tablet PC, if you're skillful with the pen interface, so the time isn't entirely wasted.

Moreover, I find that it only takes a couple of hours to get pretty good at using the Tablet PC pen interface to answer email and even to write up notes. It's another good reason to get one. Tablets are one of the economic bright spots in an otherwise rather flat industry.

WinHEC

As you'd expect from the name, WinHEC;the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference—is largely devoted to future hardware and the way it works with Windows, but there is usually a lot more, since most major hardware companies attend. Some have booths, others send tech reps, and the people who come to WinHEC are far more likely to be technical than marketing or press relations. Press coverage of WinHEC is much smaller than COMDEX, and again tends to draw tech editors, many of them old friends. The result is a very intensive week that's usually exhausting.

This year there will be a lot about the AMD Opteron, which runs both 32 and 64bit applications. That's interesting because Microsoft has only recently released its first 64bit operating system. This is Windows Server 2003, for Itanium, Intel's big iron server processors, and it's a shipping product that Microsoft is very proud of. There is no other released 64bit version of Windows, and Microsoft is not noted for 64bit operating system code. Peter Glaskowsky, Editor of Microprocessor Report, ranks Microsoft as about fifth in market share for 64bit operating systems, behind Sun Solaris, HPUX, IBMAIX, and of course Linux. An Opteron optimized Linux was released the day the Opteron chip was released.

The CD package we got at registration includes prerelease versions of XP and Windows Server 2003 for Opteron and Athlon 64 systems. There is no code of any kind, OS or application, for any Intel chip. That's interesting.

We saw Windows Server 2003 64bit Edition demonstrated on an Intel Itanium server. It was impressive. Meanwhile, AMD assures me they'll have 64bit motherboards and chips in Chaos Manor in plenty of time for me to build and at least look at a system running (prerelease) 64bit Windows before next month's deadline. Until then everything I know about 64bit systems comes from what we've been told and demonstrations we have seen; but of course it will be a while before 64bit software is important to most of us.

In the server presentation Microsoft claimed, with some evidence, that they are number one in performance and price/performance for server technology in both 32 and 64bit processor servers, and Peter Glaskowsky expects them to jump to the top in market share, because "they're that kind of company."

Virtual Servers

Microsoft demonstrated Windows Server 2003 for 32bit systems. This is a shipping product and I'll have a copy shortly. It's impressive, and I think I will like it. You can download a 180day version of Windows Server 2003 from Microsoft if you want to try it. There are some interesting features.

They also showed something that has been around for the Mac through Connectix for some time, but which is now to be part of Windows Server 2003 later this year. Although this isn't shipping yet, the demonstration was on an evaluation copy of Windows Server 2003, so if a test version isn't available today it will be soon.

They were able to take a new fast machine and put on it three different virtual servers, each running a different operating system (NT 4, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows 2003 Server). Each virtual server has its own memory, disk and other resources, and they are all insulated well enough that if one crashes the others don't know it. Each can run applications appropriate to the virtual machine's operating system. Each of the virtual machines thinks it has a C: drive and all the files and file structure of a real machine.

All the servers at Chaos Manor are old. They've run a long time without rebooting;we don't work servers very hard, and I have them mostly so I will understand the problems of people who need servers;and I will shortly put up Windows 2003 Server on a big fast new machine, probably a Pentium 4 with a gigabyte of memory. Stand by. Meanwhile, the product is launched, Microsoft is spending lots of money on it, and at a WinHEC demo it looks pretty impressive, especially when you look at the enhancements coming out Real Soon Now.

WinHEC

It was the smallest WinHEC yet, at least the smallest I have been to: under 2,000 paid attendees (I can remember 4,800 back in the dot bubble days); but no one can fault Microsoft for cutting back on content. There were eight tracks of high tech information, much of it excellent.

As usual there was some hype. WinHEC was opened by Tom Phillips, General Manager, Windows Hardware Experience Group, who sometimes reminded me of a sideshow barker telling us how much we were going to see inside. I suppose show managers have to talk like that. But for the most part this WinHEC has more content, and is better organized, than previous ones with much larger attendance.

The problem is not that there are no impending revolutions. Moore's Law has not been repealed. There are a number of expected improvements in PCs. Whether they are, as Phillips said four times, "incredibly compelling" is another story. Most of the improvements in our "rich, compelling user experience" are either not likely to be noticed, or are quite a ways off.

The only code we've got so far has been for 64bit systems, and few of you are going to be running that for a while unless you're in a few specific areas. The 64bit computers and operating systems will mostly be used for data bases of one kind or another, including graphics data bases. They're also going to be used in rendering video images;we saw at the AMD booth an Angstrommade AMD Opteron render farm in two (large) racks. The claim is that all the effects in XMEN2 and Daredevil can be rendered on just that equipment over a weekend, meaning that the artists can work during the week, have their work rendered to full image over the weekend, and have it ready for revisions and more work Monday morning.

Incidentally Hollywood insiders tell us that when a movie project is done, the usual practice is to sell the rendering computers as surplus: By the time a new project is ready to go, they'll be obsolete. Moore's law at work. Besides, it has all been expensed anyway!

Aside from 64bit code, though, most of the future is ahead of us.

It's Going To Be Great

Bill Gates's speech was interesting as usual. He's an enthusiast who knows this industry better than almost anyone else, and he spends a lot of time thinking about it; and he's an incredible optimist. He acknowledged that the industry isn't growing as it has in the past, but there are, he, said, bright spots. Price/Performance is extremely good and getting better. XP is selling well. On the downside, applications are not keeping up with hardware, and of course the economy in general is bad.

That will change. There will be new "compelling user experiences" to cause us to upgrade our systems. Alas, most of that will come with Longhorn, Microsoft's code name for the next Windows, and that's at least a year away.

Gates sure is enthusiastic about Longhorn. That, he implies, will be something everyone will want, and it will give them good reasons to upgrade all their equipment, too. It's going to be a wonderful world.

Having said that, let me hasten to add that it sounds a bit more cynical than I intended. Gates not only believes in the future, he's bet his company on it again and again, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

I believe in the future too, but when I was a lad I believed I would live to see the first man on the moon. Now I wonder if I have seen the last one. Never give up hope, but never doubt that if governments can find a way to muck things up, they probably will set up an agency to do it.